GOG adds new pricing scheme, loses 35 games from catalogue

GOG has announced that it’s offering a last chance sale on 35 games in the company’s digital catalogue, as they will no longer be available after 2 September. Titles like Gothic 3 and Red Faction 2 will be disappearing from the site after that date.

This is a result of GOG’s new approach to pricing, which they hope will make international purchases fairer for all. You’ll be familiar with the problem if you’ve ever bought a digital game; prices are sometimes 1:1 in Dollars and Euros, which seems rather on the unfair side as those aren’t currencies of equivalent value.

For that reason, says GOG:

Along with the local currency payment option, we’re starting to use our own pricing scheme that brings the value of non-US Dollar prices as close to their actual equivalents as we can help it. A game with $5.99 price tag – for example – will cost 4.49 Euro, 3.69 Pounds Sterling, 6.49 Australian Dollars, and 219 Roubles respectively.

This is not without consequence, however, because “some of our developer and publisher friends had other obligations that made it impossible to reach a common ground.”

GOG suggests that all parties tried pretty hard to retain all the games in the catalogue while honouring the new pricing scheme, but for some it hasn’t worked out. Nordic Games is the most prominent publisher who’ll no longer be selling through GOG for the time being, and the has issued a statement through a representative on the GOG forums which you can read here.

“The decision to remove certain games from the gog.com platform was not an easy one. Gog.com and Nordic simply were not able to reach a mutual agreement at the moment,” the statement reads. This suggests the Nordic titles may not be absent for good. Indeed, Nordic also make it clear that they “will continue to work together with gog.com on selected games.”